Access Azure blob storage from R notebook

Question

in python this is how I would access a csv from Azure blobs

storage_account_name = "testname"
storage_account_access_key = "..."
file_location = "wasb://example@testname.blob.core.windows.net/testfile.csv"

spark.conf.set(
  "fs.azure.account.key."+storage_account_name+".blob.core.windows.net",
  storage_account_access_key)

df = spark.read.format('csv').load(file_location, header = True, inferSchema = True)

How can I do this in R? I cannot find any documentation...

Answer 1

The AzureStor package provides an R interface to Azure storage, including files, blobs and ADLSgen2.

endp <- storage_endpoint("https://acctname.blob.core.windows.net", key="access_key")
cont <- storage_container(endp, "mycontainer")
storage_download(cont, "myblob.csv", "local_filename.csv")

Note that this will download to a file in local storage. From there, you can ingest into Spark using standard Sparklyr methods.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of AzureStor.

Answer 2

If you do not want to download it, create a tempfile and then read from it

   endp <- storage_endpoint("https://acctname.blob.core.windows.net", key="access_key")
   cont <- storage_container(endp, "mycontainer")
   fname <- tempfile()
   storage_download(cont, "myblob.csv", fname)
   df = read.csv(fname)